Go Giants

A new survey of the Great American Novel.

When Theodore Dreiser wrote “An American Tragedy,” in 1925, he meant that “American” to give some dignity to a sordid murder story. But sometime in the past forty years the sordidness got the upper hand over the adjective: “American Graffiti,” “American Gigolo,” “American Sucker,” “American Hustle,” even “American Pie”—all those “American”s superintend a story that is in some way seedy, or just naïve, yet is still meant to be exemplary. The difference between a mere “Psycho” and an “American Psycho” is the difference between a weirdo living in a lonely motel and someone who, though an even bigger weirdo, is a Wall Street slickster, and so a representative man. A movie called “American Hero” now would far more likely be about Hulk Hogan than about Dwight Eisenhower.

One lesson of Lawrence Buell’s new survey of our literature, “The Dream of the Great American Novel” (Harvard), is that the “American” in that famous phrase was one of the first instances of the kind—more ironic than solemn, and always touched with an undercurrent of self-mockery, even when people were pursuing it more openly than they do these days. When the now forgotten novelist John W. De Forest spread the phrase, in 1868, in an essay in The Nation, he meant it as a more or less straight ambition. But in Buell’s introduction one learns that Henry James, fastidious to a fault, gave De Forest’s ideal the jolly nickname of “the G.A.N.,” while William Dean Howells placed it in the same category as other quested-for chimeras, announcing that “the great American novel, if true, must be incredible.” Kept in quotation marks from the beginning, it survived more as a dream than as a goal. By the time Philip Roth, in the nineteen-seventies, got around to actually writing a novel called “The Great American Novel,” the only way to treat it was as a joke. (Roth’s—very good—novel was about baseball, then still the Great American subject.)

What De Forest and some of his followers were urging Americans to write, Buell explains, was a very specific sort of book: the kind of panoramic, class-crossing, manner-marking, epoch-defining novel that Balzac and Thackeray (and, in a more radical way, Dickens and, later, Zola) had produced in England and France. A book that gets it all in, from working-class accents to eccentric aristocrats. Why no American has yet been able to pull off that kind of book—a novel to stand alongside “Lost Illusions” or “Bleak House,” as a cross-section cut from a country—is a good question, which Buell rather quickly passes over. (It might simply be that, in a country dedicated to the proposition of the autonomous individual, books about people defined by their place in a social web will never fly, while books about autonomous agents will always have a market, even if their moral is that no agent is truly autonomous.)

Buell’s new idea is that the dream of the Great American Novel has resolved itself, invisibly, into four distinct and recurring “scripts.” The first script, he explains, derives from Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letter,” and its essential quality is its adaptiveness, the way the book has lent itself to a “series of memorable imitations and reinventions.” But one might also add that the subject itself is “canonical”—the tale of sexual transgression and punishment in enclosed American communities is, after all, one that reaches from Hawthorne to such later candidates as Updike’s “Couples.” Then, there’s the “up-from” novel, which follows an aspirant as he or she rises from “obscurity to prominence” (“Invisible Man,” “The Adventures of Augie March”); the “romance of the divide,” which dramatizes a racial or geographic gap and the mostly failed attempts to bridge it (“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”; all of Faulkner); and, finally, the “compendious meganovel,” which may superficially resemble the Balzacian book but is more often a microcosm than a true cross-section—a bunch of guys on a boat hunting whales, a squadron of soldiers at war. (All the American types are there, but crowded in, not spaced out: the familiar platoon with the wise guy from Brooklyn, the towheaded boy from farm country, etc.)

Buell, a professor of American literature at Harvard, has many shrewd things to say about patterns in American fiction. He shows, for instance, that, for all the presumed chauvinism of our literature, the up-from story in nineteenth-century literature was actually far more often a girl’s story than a boy’s: Henry James’s novels, as much as Edith Wharton’s, are concerned mainly with how women make their way. He also identifies, and explains, why American fiction is drawn to a “split-focused narrative structure in which a symbolically charged actor gets viewed largely from the perspective of more quotidian dramatized observers.” It’s a kind of fiction, he suggests, uniquely suited to a country often shaped by “a symbiotic tension between a rigid, obsolescent order of values and a more ‘modern,’ disenchanted, pragmatic, and intellectually mobile emergent one exemplified by the observer(s).” The narrators are plain modern guys, and they look in wonder at the shining archaic hero. “Moby-Dick” and “The Great Gatsby” are classic cases. So is Owen Wister’s “The Virginian,” a once universally read novel of a dude who goes West and meets an “omni competent” but soon to be out-of-date ranch hand, and Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men”—once regarded as a very-big-deal potential G.A.N.—where the populist Huey Long character is observed by a cautiously modern Southern gent.

Good ideas about books tend to be both simple and sticky. “The anxiety of influence” may have become a catchpenny phrase, but there’s something in the notion that strong writers either swerve from their predecessors or complete them. Buell’s scripts are often sticky in that way. Thinking of the split-consciousness type, where the enfeebled narrator studies the active subject, one instantly adds to the list, with twists and turns, other good A.N.s: Randall Jarrell’s “Pictures from an Institution,” where the hyperactive postwar college president is observed by a weak, “Europeanized” narrator, and Budd Schulberg’s “The Disenchanted,” set in the nineteen-thirties, where the P.O.V. is that of a young left-wing screenwriter, and the romantic figure he is struggling to understand, his own tarnished Gatsby, is a portrait of the dissolute, post-“Crack-Up” Scott Fitzgerald.

You could also add “Citizen Kane” to the list of old-style heroes with new-style narrators, of course, and that raises an issue with the idea of these scripts: the scripts apply to scripts, as much as to books, and therefore seem just to be stories that work, rather than something peculiar to the novel. (Roth says, in “Reading Myself and Others,” that he first learned about point of view from listening to Mississippi’s Red Barber announce Brooklyn Dodger games—in a country with many accents and games that are always changing, the best narrator is the guy from outside the borough.)

Which leads to a larger question, for the most part scanted in Buell’s study: What is it in the scripts of the American novel that you don’t find in the British novel or the French novel? There are, after all, many famous and chewy French and English novels on up-from subjects: how does Balzac’s “Lost Illusions” or Thomas Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge” differ from our American tales of ascent? We have many “mooncalf” sagas, of troubled youths who see the world with sensitivity and humor: Twain (“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”), Fitzgerald (“This Side of Paradise”), Salinger (“The Catcher in the Rye”), Roth (“Goodbye, Columbus”). But you can wonder how they differ from the French kind, like Françoise Sagan’s “Bonjour, Tristesse,” or Alain-Fournier’s prewar classic “Le Grand Meaulnes,” which also has Gatsby-ish echoes: a mysterious figure in love with a remote, rich princess. Maybe it matters that the idea of an aristocracy, even if it exists only as a community of ghosts, persists in Alain-Fournier as it does not in Fitzgerald. The absence of a hovering aristocracy gives the American novel the urge to induce one—the fairy-tale energy derived from needing a princess, whether Daisy Buchanan or Brenda Patimkin.

Still, the point of revisionist history of this kind is not to settle old arguments but to start new ones, and Buell does. His view of books tends to be thoroughly sociological or historicizing. At times, this pays off; he makes, for instance, the very interesting point that the kind of ascent that Gatsby achieves—poor boy to billionaire—was far rarer in the mid-twenties than it had been three decades earlier, so that this particular up-from tale is really more a nostalgic memento of Fitzgerald’s St. Paul upbringing than an account of the roaring twenties. But then “The Great Gatsby” is a made-up story about that unreal fair princess and an improbable knight-errant, and no more meant to survive that kind of historical test than any other American myth. Fiction departs from the truth to intensify it. In Victorian England, there were doubtless no young gentlemen whose great expectations derived from secret funds sent by convicts who had been transported to Australia many years earlier, but Dickens’s vision of a society whose top ranks rested, without knowing it, on the labor of the very bottom one was poetically exactly right.

Like most contemporary professors of literature, Buell doesn’t make distinctions between the really good stuff and the merely significant stuff. Indeed, “The Dream of the Great American Novel” can make the life of literature into a dense sociological echo chamber. Buell is a passionately horizontal reader, looking across time from book to book, more than a vertical one, looking deep into a page. In Chapter 10, praising Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” one of his most beloved G.A.N. candidates, he tells us disarmingly that “one measure of ‘Beloved’ ’s achievement is its brilliantly subtle reinvention of key strategies, even individual scenes, from the novels examined in Chapters 7-9.” There’s little sense of books as they exist for readers, in people and phrases. For Buell, the difference between a beautifully written book and a badly written book exists at about the same level as a politician’s hair—it’s something you might notice, but not something that should distract you from his real agenda. Humor is assumed to be sprinkled on sentences like confectioner’s sugar at a bakery. Tone, mood, and dramatic incident are largely taken for granted—the work, the will, the labor of writing is entirely invisible. “Moby-Dick” is simply a fancier version of what you find in “The Virginian.”

Buell’s defense seems the familiar one: what we mean by good and bad, beautiful and ugly, changes so much over time, and is itself so dependent on context, that to fetishize these terms is a way of not actually studying literature. You just end up studying your own sensibility. You can’t “get” a good book like “Huck Finn” without passing through a badly written one like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” (Buell presses the insight that Huck’s heroism in opposing slavery, even at the risk of damnation, is a whole lot less heroic in the eighteen-eighties, with the evil of slavery a settled question, than the same attitudes were in Stowe’s time.)

Still, how much better “Huck Finn” is than “Uncle Tom” doesn’t depend on where it stands in the history of other books; it depends on the flow of its line, on Twain’s magical simplification of language. Huck’s comment on “Pilgrim’s Progress”—“The statements was interesting, but tough”—is the perfect American summation not just of Bunyan but of a whole kind of philosophical literature. And when Huck says of the gloomy backwoods-Gothic poet Emmeline Grangerford, “I reckoned, that with her disposition, she was having a better time in the graveyard,” he writes an epitaph not just for Emmeline but for an entire strain of the American morbid confessional, right through Sylvia Plath.

The sociological turn too quickly makes books into steps in career-building. By writing “Invisible Man,” we’re told, Ralph Ellison “opened up a never ending series of opportunities for high-profile interviews and conferences, critical essays and position papers, fellowships, and visiting professorships.” Buell’s sense of what matters in fiction depends to a disquieting degree on best-seller lists and even Amazon reviews—not exactly a scientific index of opinion, let alone of the difference between dull and distinguished writing. What is meant to be a disabused view of literary culture becomes an enthralled view of literary commerce. The critical view of American literary commerce and the commercial view of American literary commerce end up looking oddly the same.

With every allowance for the virtues of treating books as commodities like any other, the literary marketplace might still be made distinct from the community of readers. This distinction is subtle, and hard to make cartographic, but it’s one known to both book buyers and booksellers. The literary marketplace responds to headlines and shared trauma in a more or less predictable way: books about sex and vampires and Jesus sell; more subtly—Buell’s point—books about the illusion of social updraft in America sell, too. What sells says a lot about the country; even the kind of sex that sells—adultery in John O’Hara’s time, S. & M. amid extreme wealth now—tells you something about the readers who buy the books. Yet the community of readers has an existence outside the literary marketplace as well, and is responsible for the slow but irresistible rise and fall of reputations. When you read the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop today, you are startled to realize that, in their day, Lowell was a god and Bishop still very much an aspirant, a judgment that has been turned almost on its head now. The forces that propelled the change come mostly from below. No one biography, no one critical text, no one “reading,” and certainly no one publisher altered the view; readers altered it by reading and then talking to one another. It was the suffrage of ordinary readers that rediscovered Barbara Pym and remade Trollope a classic alongside Dickens. The literary marketplace turns profits; the community of readers makes reputations. (And guarantees the value of literary estates.) A study of the literary marketplace is essential in order to be honest about the development of the taste of a community of readers, but it can’t replace it.

How the two interact is a study in itself. The now unread Van Wyck Brooks’s five-volume history of American literature, “Makers and Finders,” though prize-winning (and best-selling) in the late thirties and forties, seems quaint and narrowly Waspy now. But it combined a strong sense of why books occur at the moment that they do with an ear for the sentences that make books last. In his great “New England Indian Summer,” Brooks understood that De Forest, to name only one, was inseparable from the history of the post-Civil War era, while what made Emily Dickinson great was not that she achieved some synthesis of later-nineteenth-century ideas but that she could describe a stranger with a face “as handsome and meaningless as the full moon.”

As Buell, nearing the end of his study, turns to his own view of what comes close to the Great American Novel among contemporary contenders—Morrison’s “Beloved”; Roth’s late “American trilogy” (“American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist,” “The Human Stain”)—one senses that the “American” may have been a misdirection. What matters is the “Great.” No matter how resistant and detached Buell is from the idea of the G.A.N., he cannot resist an idea of bigness: he favors “Beloved” over “The Catcher in the Rye,” say, because it seems somehow to get it all in, to sum it all up, to encompass its predecessors. He writes much more about the American trilogy (what is sometimes called by Roth fans the “Letter to Stockholm” series) than about Roth’s smaller but perhaps fictionally more intense, more eccentrically obsessive Zuckerman books, because the three novels cover more ground, report on how gloves were made as well as on the actions of the hands beneath. Nothing is more American than our will to make the enormous do the work of the excellent. We have googly eyes for gargantuan statements. Even in this supposedly diminished era, the credence that Americans give to grandeur and gravity sets our novels apart.

It may be a script that also runs outside the novel proper; Francis Ford Coppola, in “Apocalypse Now,” came as close to the Great American Movie as anyone has, by sacrificing his sanity to this idea and satirizing it at the same time. Brando’s Kurtz is the elder Hemingway, crazy with frustrated ambition and grandiosity among the heathen. But the trait lends our literature its dignity, even in a hard time in the marketplace, giving significance to those thousand-page black holes—Ross Lockridge, Jr.,’s “Raintree County,” Harold Brodkey’s “Runaway Soul.” Few may read them, but the American community of readers holds them in regard. We hear about Matthew Barney’s six-hour film of Norman Mailer’s seven-hundred-page “Ancient Evenings,” an unwatchable adaptation of an unreadable book, and we think, Hey, that might be great! It’s the American way. ♦